Persian Girls: A Memoir (27 page)

“Have you not had Bijan with you even for visits?”

She shook her head. “Taheri took him away from Tehran, and no one can track their address; it keeps changing. Even my lawyer, who is very good in his field, hasn’t been able to force Taheri to come to court. I can’t give up hope. . . .”

Next to Bijan’s photograph stood a photograph of me, not a recent one but one from Ahvaz. I was standing by the Karoon River and my hair was blowing around my head.

“Remember those walks on the bridge and all the dreams we shared?” Pari said.

Mansour called us into the living room. We joined him and the others to have pastries and
sharbat
with orange petals floating in it.

Father clearly wanted the visit to go smoothly and to show his foreign son-in-law what a good family he had married into. It was hard to tell what he really thought about my marrying a man from another country and religion, whom I had met on my own. If Father had any reservations he did not reveal them. He smiled a lot and spoke about history and politics, as he used to with my brothers. He described Iran as being on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The Shah was pulled and pushed between the clergy and America, each demanding something different. Competing with the loud pulse of modernity was the equally loud pulse of opposition, not only from the religious segment of society but from intellectuals, too. Father admitted he himself was caught in the same ambivalence: he wanted to maintain traditional values and at the same time was won over by some aspects of modernity. He went on to say how in spite of SAVAK’s close watch on people, corruption was rampant in Iran. It wasn’t unusual for someone to sell the same piece of land to two people and get away with it; lawsuits took many years to settle and usually the person who paid the higher bribe won.

After an hour Mansour left to go to work, from which he had taken time off in the morning. He said he would stay in his office and work through siesta time. Father invited us to lunch at the restaurant of the Tehran Hilton Hotel, where he and Mohtaram were staying.

The restaurant was filled mainly with Americans, but the menu featured a number of Iranian dishes. Howie and I ordered lemon chicken and cherry rice,
gormeh sabsi,
and
joojeh kabab.
For dessert we had
gaz
and tea, which tasted like sweet, hot perfume.

I looked at Father across the table. He seemed softer somehow. Perhaps he really had forgiven me. If I had gone my own way, at least I hadn’t gotten him into trouble. And although Mohtaram didn’t address me directly, she smiled faintly when she looked at me, as if trying to reconcile with me, a daughter whom she had more or less abandoned. After I left home, I never heard from her: no letters, no packages like the ones other girls in college received from their mothers, no acknowledgment of my marriage or even my baby. It had all been incomprehensible to me for so long, yet I could see a frailty about her; she wasn’t the cold, agitated mother I recalled. She seemed even more enveloped in my father’s shadow than during those years when I lived with them.

“I didn’t always predict my children’s future,” Father said suddenly. “My sons now live in America.” He stopped short. After a pause, he began instead to talk about the advantages of Tehran.

A
few days into the visit, Mansour said, jokingly, “Your sister is cut off from reality.” I didn’t know what he meant, so I didn’t respond, but I had noticed a remoteness about Pari in the company of others. Mansour was domestic—he supervised the household, told Pari what to prepare for meals, brought home large bags of produce and dairy products, and helped her with the cooking.

Once my uncle Ahmad took the afternoon off to show Howie around. He was eager to meet and practice his English with Howie. (Ahmad was a clerk in the Petroleum Ministry and hoped to be promoted. Since many of the employees at the ministry were Americans, being fluent in English was very important.) The American Embassy was near his office and he dropped in there every day to pick up free English-language newsletters. He was a lively, attractive man; when I lived with Maryam he often visited and entertained my cousins and me with jokes and card tricks and marbles. Like Father, he had married a nine-year-old girl—in his case eighteen years younger than himself. His wife, Mahtab, was blond and blue-eyed, from the north of Iran bordering on Russia, and she had some Russian blood. Mahtab sometimes visited Maryam by herself and complained that Ahmad stayed out late every night. Maryam told her, “He has you, a young, beautiful wife. Isn’t that enough?”

I liked Uncle Ahmad in spite of his faults because he was full of dreams. He played the violin well and with emotion. He looked romantic as he held it on his shoulder, his eyes focused on something far away. He regularly went to the zoor Khaneh (House of Strength), where men exercised ritualistically, with classical Iranian music playing in the background. He even kept a photograph of himself showing off his muscles.

That night, Howie told me he liked my uncle but felt bad for him: he was an ambitious man searching for something that he didn’t seem to find in the Iranian culture.

“Your uncle told me Pari is depressed and miserable about many things in her life,” Howie said, looking concerned.

“I know she’s upset about her son, and the custody battle that has been going on for years. Was there anything else?”

“Your uncle didn’t elaborate. He said it in the context that he thought Pari should have gone to America, too, like you did.”

The fact that Pari had confided in Uncle Ahmad shook me up, made me feel she was overflowing with unhappiness.

One afternoon everyone went out, leaving me alone with Pari.

“Pari, we haven’t been alone together for years. I’ve been yearning for it,” I said as we sat on the living-room sofa.

“Yes, and there’s so much I want to talk to you about, it’s hard to know where to start,” she said. She told me she was still struggling for personal and artistic identity in Tehran with its fierce double standard and sexism. The whole city was the same tension-inducing amalgam as Ahvaz. True, in some of the ultramodern sections of Tehran, girls mingled freely with boys at parties, drank alcoholic drinks, danced to Western music blaring from sophisticated sound systems—what we used to crave when we were teenagers. But now she realized those were only superficial elements in the context of a larger lack of freedom for women, and men in certain areas.

There was all the censorship and oppression that kept down both men and women. And then there were all the limitations for women. Even though the government supported some official opportunities for women, the situation hadn’t improved much because of the prevailing paternalistic attitude. Only a very small segment of the female population was employed. When a woman achieved success or prominence in the public arena, it was often due to her relationship to an influential man—as his mother, wife, sister, or daughter, or because of governmental tokenism. There had been a female senator, but she was never allowed a real voice. Her proposal to abolish the rule that a wife must have permission from her husband to travel to another country was rejected with no reason given. Angry and frustrated, she resigned from her post.

The few women who managed to succeed in the arts—such as the popular singers Googoosh and Hayedeh, the actress Aghdashloo, and the poet Furugh Farrukhzad—were referred to as “promiscuous” or “pushy.”

The notion of progress was a matter of pride for educated and professional Iranians, yet they were merely paying lip service when it came to their attitudes toward women. The women who were walking around all made up, in miniskirts, still had to obey their fathers or husbands. So did the intellectual women who sat in cafés and argued about Descartes and Hegel and Marx. Like Pari, women were forced to leave their children with their husbands if they initiated divorce. The 1975 amendment to the Family Protection Law gave women equal rights in divorce, custody of children, and marriage settlements, but these reforms weren’t actually put into practice; in court women almost always lost.

Before Taheri took their son and left for other cities, Pari used to stand in doorways or behind a tree near their house in Tehran just to get a glimpse of Bijan. Once she knocked on the door and asked Behjat, Taheri’s sister, if she would let her have her son for a few hours. Behjat refused. Pari then went to Bijan’s school, introduced herself to his teacher, and asked permission to see him. Bijan was brought to her, but when she tried to pick him up and kiss him, he broke away and ran back to his classroom.

“It all starts at the top,” Pari said. “The Shah’s conflicting values apply to his attitude toward women, too. With all these claims of improving women’s situations, the Shah is totally sexist. When a monarch condones something, it trickles all the way down to every man. Did you read that interview by the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci? A section of it was translated into Farsi and printed in a magazine, which was then quickly closed down because of it.”

I had read Fallaci’s
Interview with History,
translated into English. In one section the Shah said:

 

 

Not long ago, the Shah had repeated the same comments to Barbara Walters in an interview.

I recalled from my childhood the Shah’s wedding to Farah Diba, a woman nineteen years younger than him. She was indeed beautiful, graceful, and feminine.

Pari said it made her happy that I left Iran and was able to fulfill my dream of becoming a published writer. We began to reminisce, the things half forgotten by one and fully recalled by the other. That magical afternoon when the little boy handed Pari a rose. That evening on the Karoon River bridge when boys followed us, whispering endearments. Me reading to Pari the stories I wrote. Her playing Laura onstage. It was as if nothing that had happened since equaled in intensity and excitement those moments Pari and I had shared.

Pari and I left the house and walked to Café Miami, where she sometimes met with friends.

At the café, tables were set on a platform over a stream. The air was clear, and from our table we could see the mountains against an azure sky. Also in our view was the Moulin Rouge cinema showing
The Castle of Fu Manchu
; teenage boys were lined up in front of it. Next to us a group of Iranian men smoked water pipes and sipped tea.

“You used to love ice cream with vanilla pieces in it,” Pari said. We ordered two.

As soon as the waiter left, I poured out my problems in America. “I had many dark years before I found some peace,” I said. “I was so lonely in the provincial college. In New York, at first, I was penniless. And now I’m not quite American or Iranian. It pains me to think that I’ve drifted away so much from Maryam’s way of life, her beliefs. I wish so much that she, and you of course, were a part of my life.”

The voice of a woman singing reached us from a radio inside the restaurant, mingling with the murmur of water flowing in the stream. The song was based on a Furugh Farrukhzad poem dedicated to her son:

 

 

We listened to the song for a few moments.

“I don’t think Furugh’s car crash was an accident,” Pari said. “You know that she was killed driving her car in Tehran. It was years ago, but I still remember all the talk and speculation that it was self-inflicted or murder by the SAVAK. I’m convinced it was suicide. The public praising and condemning her at the same time must have been so hard to take. And then there was her losing custody of her son.”

“Pari, I read that Mrs. Soleimani was killed in a car crash, too, that it was really not an accident but murder by the SAVAK.”

“Yes, I heard that, and in her case there was evidence that someone ran into her car deliberately. I was upset for days.”

“So was I.”

“Didn’t I write to you about it?”

I shook my head.

“Letters weren’t getting to places they were meant to all the time.” After a contemplative pause, Pari added, “The way Furugh died, running her car into a tree . . . It wasn’t murder by the SAVAK for a change; it was her own doing.” A sheen of sadness spread over Pari’s face. “So often I wish I could smash my life into pieces and put them back together in a different way. It’s the putting back that’s hard, when you have so few choices.”

“Maybe you and Mansour could emigrate to America and live there. I’d love for my little girl to get to know you, to be close to you.”

“I’d love to see dear Leila, too. But there are so many obstacles. In America Mansour could never get the kind of work he has here. Anyway, he loves Iran. But more than anything, Nahid, I can’t bear leaving the country until I know I’ve done everything to get Bijan back. But then if I do get him back it will be only part-time and I have to remain in Iran. No judge would allow me to live out of the country and deprive a boy of his father for long stretches of time. It has been so many years without any results but I keep hoping, hoping. I can’t live without that hope.”